There are no ties in Baseball, neither should their be the wishy-washy “inconclusive evidence”. Safe or Out, Fair or Foul.

And no more of this phony managerial stalling until somebody in the clubhouse can get another view. Either challenge immediately or forget it. If that means giving teams two challenges, so be it. It will still be faster in the long run.

The video operators don’t have access to what the fans see, so that video operators are still demonstrably missing calls. No confidence there now. The gamesmanship is super lame. The only answer is to have video operators have access to all feeds, and to do quick rulings on all close plays throughout the game.

The umpires are also not calling catchers on blocking the lane to the plate. This timidity will continue, forcing some team to smack a catcher to start the enforcement.

Someone’s suggestion here that they could easily put a fair/foul sensor on the poles is great.

And finally: after so many years of needless injuries worth untold millions of dollars on the fences that border the field of play, why aren’t they standardized and made safer throughout the league? There’s an huge variance on the collision absorption even on padded walls. Do we want to see exciting defense or cringe whenever a player tries for a ball?

I’d like to thank all the people who just had to have instant replay. It’s a disaster conceived by people who never actually played the game and have this idea that they can legislate everything in the world into some non-sensical concept of “fairness” that does not exist. The game is irreparably harmed by the instant replay revolution. It’s is awful and has no business being part of traditional baseball. Everyone’s team is going to suffer from bad calls. Too bad…play through it and get over it. In this exercise of seeking ultimate justice we have destroyed a great game: the very essence of which is “the human factor” that we are slowly phasing out.

“In this exercise of seeking ultimate justice we have destroyed a great game: the very essence of which is “the human factor” that we are slowly phasing out.”

On the contrary, the “human factor” we all care about is the players. Baseball can and should benefit from the umpires being invisible. The sport will always be better off as long as the outcomes are decided by the quality of the players instead of the arbiters.

It’s a continuation from last year; as we know even some home run reviews were blown. I recall the ball Steven Drew hit over the centerfield fence at Fenway. The ball hit on top on the platform were the camera is; so it bounced UP in the air, then against a wall, and came back down on the field. The ups blew the call, reviewed it, and blew it again. How could a ball that didn’t clear the fence bounce UP? Even if you can’t see where it landed (you could on TV), any ball that hit the fence short of a home run would simply bounce off the wall and down.
They gave Drew a triple and he later scored, so maybe that’s why it wasn’t such a big deal.